Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

people who had not invested in relationships—who had prioritized their careers over families and friends or had struggled to connect for other reasons—were mostly miserable.

The second mindset—the emotional mindset—emerges when we discuss How Do We Feel? and draws on neural structures—the

asking everyone to write out just one sentence, before each meeting, explaining their goals for the upcoming discussion.

That’s how a quiet negotiation works: It is a process of people deciding, together, what topics we’ll discuss, and how we’ll discuss them. It is an attempt to figure out what we all want from a conversation, even if we’re not, ourselves, sure at first.

The first step of a quiet negotiation is figuring out what people want from a conversation. The second step is determining how we’re going to make choices together—and that means deciding if this is a rational conversation or an empathetic one. Are we going to make decisions through analysis and reason, or through empathy and narratives?

When we make it clear to others that we are trying to hear their emotions, when we genuinely try to match or acknowledge their moods and energy, we begin to reciprocate and entrain. We bond. But what

High centrality participants tended to ask ten to twenty times as many questions as other participants.

many discussions are actually three different conversations. There are practical, decision-making conversations that focus on What’s This Really About? There are emotional conversations, which ask How Do We Feel? And there are social conversations that explore Who Are We? We are often moving in and out of all three conversations as a dialogue unfol

Often, what people desire from a negotiation isn’t obvious at first.